medieval

It is quite predictable that, having stated in a blog post that I intend to blog twice a week I would then not find the time for three weeks to write anything. This is in part due to it being January, which is an impossibly busy month, but also to the fact that I try so very hard not to be perpetually grumpy on this blog. My last post was grumpy, so I thought this one should be playful, or whimsical, or hopeful, or hilarious, or at least realtively sanguine. But it is not to be, for I have been occupied with History Day.

Be not fooled into thinking that I have anything against history — Mrs S is twenty kinds of nerd, and History Nerd is one of them — or that I object to my children learning history in school. I encourage it. I would have been thrilled to my clumsy, nerdy toes to have had a history day in school when I was growing up. Come to school dressed up, spend the day learning about what life was like in another time: what could be better? So when we had a notice home telling us about history day, and that C’s class would be focusing on medieval times, and R’s class would be studying ancient Egypt, I started planning.

That letter home should have been the first warning that all was not as it seemed, for it suggested that the girls in C’s class of four and five year olds may want to dress like this:

Int he market for 18th century garb? This image is from jarnaginco.com.

Historical this style may be, but it is from a different era: the 18th century. You may at this point be taking umbrage at the perceived insinuation that you should have known this. Rest assured I do not expect everyone to be able to identify historical fashions to the nearest century, but I do expect those teaching history to my children to correctly match the wardrobe with the era they are teaching. The most basic internet image search will furnish you with dozens of pictures of medieval dress. How about this?

The point is: long, rather unstuctured gowns, a veil or very simple cap (but not a mobcap) perhaps a sincture at the waist, and you become a medieval lady. The argument from the school, had I raised the issue, might have been that they were going for something simple, that most students could manage. But medieval doesn’t need to be difficult: a tunic or nightgown from mom or a big sister (safety pins at the neck and sleeves as needed for fit), a cord as a sincture at the waist, and a scarf pinned to the hair as a veil and presto! Add cape if desired.

So, ignoring the misguided advice of the school, I set to work making C a medieval gown. (R was more or less abandoned at this point. I ordered him a cheap pharaoh costume online. Obviously this displays great favouritism, and I explain it thus: I only had time to make one costume. I have two little girls who like to dress up, so a medieval lady costume will get much more use than a pharaoh costume.) I have precisely two domestic skills: I can cook and I can sew. I did, however, discover, while sewing a six-panelled gown by hand, that it is just possible to be too medival. (I ordered a sewing machine this week in preparation for next time.) But after two weeks of pricked fingers and a few glaring mistakes, C had a gown fit for a fourteenth century princess:

Obviously sharing this image is somewhat boastful: look at me! I can sew! (Assuming you ignore the scruffiness of the hem, visible in this picture: C was adament about having a train and I was improvising.) But that is not actually the point. I am trying to zero in on the level of historical accuracy I expect from a history day. I chose a wildly anachronistic fabric. Metallic gold brocade? Nope. Not medieval. But the shape and feel are right, and it is shiny and fun, so clearly I can temper my grumpy pedantry from time to time. If I hadn’t been looking for an excuse to start sewing again, or if I hadn’t thought this dress would get a lot of wear as dress up, I would have put C in one of my long tunic-type shirts as described above and been done with it.

We arrived at history day (parents were invited to stay for the morning in the Early Years classes), where all the boys were dressed as knights and most of the girls were dressed as 18th century housemaids, and were introduced to a variety of activities to teach us about medieval times. We could paint a coat of arms on a shield. We could decorate a plastic gobelet with coloured sharpe markers to have at the snacktime medieval banquet of bread, butter, apples and “wine”. We could practice juggling with beanbags like a court jester. All of these sounded great: little lessons to be had, but appropriate for four and five year olds, and fun. But wait, there’s more…

We were invited to make little pouches of potpourri. Now, if you were going to explain to a group of four and five year olds what potpourri had to do with the middle ages would you tell them

(A) People in the middle ages might have wanted a pouch of potpourri to sniff because there were no toilets and people threw their waste into the streets, animals were everywhere, there was no rubbish collection, no refrigeration, and many people believed that the foul odours of everyday life, called miasma, were what made people sick, so if you had something nice to smell it would not only make walking through town bearable, but you believed you might avoid sickness.

Or

(B) People in medieval times never took baths. They also never ever washed their clothes, and they never took their clothes off no matter how smelly or dirty they got because being naked was sinful. So they needed potpourri because everybody stank and without it they couldn’t have stood to be around eachother.

If you said (B), congratualtions! Give yourself five points, a cookie, a bit of extra deoderant, and a diploma certifying you to be a Tudor PR agent or a primary school history teacher, whichever you prefer. If you said (A), bad luck. You may console yourself with a self-righteous blogpost so that everyone knows how much more you know about history than anyone else in the known universe.

Additionally, we were invited to do some medieval dancing. Huzzah! Now, if you were teaching five year olds about medieval dancing would you:

(A) Tell the children that medieval dancing was very slow and boring, and that they would have hated it because there are lots of rules and it isn’t fun like dancing is now.

(B) Say that medieval dancing was always very serious and no one was allowed to smile.

(C) Say that medieval people only danced to songs in 4:4 time.

(D) Say “Let’s dance to a medieval song!” and then teach a dance to Greensleeves, a Rennaissance song in 3:4 time.

(E) All of the above.

Full marks will only be awarded for (E). Marks will be deducted if you decide to loudly count out the 3:4 beat to “help” the children (and perhaps to make a point), but they will be restored if you remember just in time that, no matter the absurdity of the exercise, good manners are fitting in any age.

I can hear the shrieks of anger from the primary school teachers even as I type this: “You have no idea how hard it is to plan an activity day like this! You have no idea how much work it is! We use resource guides! We’re not historians!” Followed swiftly by “So there are a few details they got wrong. So what? The kids are five. They’re not even going to remember.” This will not do. First of all, I do know how much work goes into planning a History Day. Second, I know teachers draw heavily on teaching resources, which may themselves be inaccurate. Maybe my exasperation should be directed towards the author of a sub-standard teaching manual, or towards whoever taught this unfortunate teacher that all medieval people were dirty, dour, prudish savages. I am not denying that the children had fun, or saying that days like this aren’t a great addition to school learning. But there’s no point in teaching something that isn’t true, even if it’s fun. In fact, there is every reason not to teach falsehood. If you learn something that’s not true, it’s not real learning: it’s just setting up a mental stumbling block that could trip you up at any point in the future.

And five year olds do remember. If we don’t expect them to absorb what they learn at five, why are we teaching them to read and write and count? Even if a five year old doesn’t remember every fact he learns, what you teach him will create an impression, and that will stick with him. Tell him that medieval people smelt worse than he could possibly imagine and you create the impression that these people knew nothing, and were too lazy and disgusting to bother with basic self-care. He might return to history to be shocked and amused by how gross and ignorant everyone was back then, but you’re already fermenting trouble for the future, should it be suggested that he could learn something of value from studying the middle ages. If you set up the contrast of the fun, sweet-smelling modern times versus the boring, revolting medieval times, you strip away the value of studying history. In a short twleve years that five year old child could be informing his Intro to Philosophy prof that there’s no point in studying Plato or Aristotle, or even Aquinas or Descartes, Kant or Kierkegaard, because those are all dead white guys who lived a long time ago and “humans have moved on,” so he won’t be doing those pointless assigned readings. (True story.)

I know that kids think gross history is fun. Horrible Histories, a UK series of books and TV shows aimed at kids, trades on this, and mostly does a brilliant job. There is a whole sketch in which the unwashed peasants of the dark ages exchange buckets of pig manure for Christmas, but by the end of the scene you have a pretty good idea about why poop was so important to peasant farmers. Behind the deliberately hammy horror, there’s a sort of reverence (but by no means a preachiness) for history. Pig poop is funny. There’s no arguing against that. But isn’t if fascinating the use farmers did, and do, make of it? By all means gross kids out, but not to make historical figures seem like the dregs of some revolting carnival freak show. The aim should be to turn them into scholars, not voyeurs. Five year olds are plenty old enough for a simple explanation of why things were different back then. What they are not old enough for is sneaky Hegelianism that subtly assures them that their age is a pinnacle of some historical destiny, and that they may sneer at all who went before. True, what happened back then was not always good, and we hopefully know better now. But it is hard to even take the transgressions of the past seriously if we’ve decided their perpetrators were buffons. In another ten years these five year olds should be having a good think about how people not unlike themselves became the authors of such atrocities as slavery and the Holocaust (those are the two that still make it onto school syllabi, afterall), and it is short-sighted to set up the kind of thinking that says “People used to do bad things because they were stupid, but I am an enlightened modern person and therefore not suceptible to such errors.”

I read somewhere — perhaps some knowledgeable reader may provide the citation that eludes me — that the study of history consists of being taught that things were a certain way, only to be told the next year that ‘Actually, you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.’ But it’s a lot easier to build upon and give nuance to a basic view of history that is at least arguably true, and it’s a lot easier to teach a student who has learnt to take a genuine interst in what people did in the past. So, even if it’s just a history day for five year olds, let’s start by getting the information right. Do it because you care about truth, or do it to avoid angry rants from disgruntled former-academic classroom parents, or, if you must, do it to avoid returning to the Dark Ages, when ignorance stalked the land like a living pestilence… Actually, I’ll have to ask you to stop right there. But that is a topic for another day.